Ars Reviews the 2008 MacBook: weighing the Pros and cons

The new aluminum MacBook moves Apple's consumer portable that much closer to …

Input and output

The trackpad

The new MacBook shares the supersized, buttonless trackpad with the rest of the portable line. We were used to a previous-generation Apple laptop, but we were able to hit the ground running as soon as we realized that you can simply keep doing what you always did by thumbing the place where the button used to be. After that, it's just a question of memorizing how to wave around three and four fingers for additional functions. The three finger wipes are application-specific, though only a few applications support them. In Mail, dragging down or up with three fingers moves to the next/previous message; in Preview this gesture maps to next/previous page. In Safari, a three finger wipe to the left or right navigates back and forward. A few programs support rotating with a two-finger gesture, and a few more, including Mail and Safari, support zoom using an iPhone-style pinch.

With the old trackpads, it was possible to turn on "ignore accidental trackpad input" in the Preferences. This is no longer an option. Apparently, this is now the default, with the new, bigger trackpads requiring some hefty accidental input ignoring. Some units had problems registering clicks when the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros hit the street, but Apple has since refined the algorithms in a firmware update, and our trackpad use has been problem-free.

The keyboard: sensing the light

In addition to the beefier CPU and a larger hard drive, the extra $300 for the high end MacBook will get you the illuminated keyboard that has long been a staple of Apple's pro laptops. The keyboard only lights up in a dim environment, which the MacBook detects through a single light sensor located just to the left of the iSight.

On the old MacBook Pro, sometimes the environmental light and the keyboard illumination conspire to render the keys impossible to distinguish, but with the new dark keys and white letters this is no longer a problem. The keyboard is very nice to type on, and the play/pause key is a nice touch. However, Apple should really make these functions more customizable. For instance, for users who often hook up to beamers to give presentations, the loss of the display mirroring on/off function that used to be under F7 could prove problematic.

Displays

Like its bigger sibling, the MacBook now sports a very bright and power efficient LED-backlit LCD display. It's also very shiny, more so than the previous generation glossy displays. Comparing last year's glossy MacBook Pro, a new MacBook and a sheet of glass, the shininess compares as about 5 : 7 : 10. There has been some speculation about whether the MacBook screen has an anti-reflective coating. The way it looks to us is that the actual LCD display does, but not the glass covering it. The photo on the right shows some fluorescent lights reflected in the MacBook's screen. It shows two reflections: a main white one, which extends to the black border around the screen, and a fainter, purplish reflection that stops at the black border. The two reflections overlap in the photo, with the purplish one extending a bit further to the left.

The enclosure and the backlighting is where the similarities between the different laptop lines end: the MacBook display is not playing in the same league as those of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. Viewing angles are limited, especially in the vertical direction, and the contrast fairly poor: black just isn't as black as on the more expensive laptops. All models have the light sensor at the top of the display that controls the display brightness as well as the keyboard illumination, if available. This location works much better than under the grilles in the old MacBook Pros, where the sensors could easily be confused by papers or wrists casting shadows on them, or overhead lighting.

The MacBook can drive external displays with resolutions up to 2560x1600 through its new mini DisplayPort connector. But this requires either a VGA or a DVI dongle for existing displays, which are sold separately (as is the Apple remote). The VGA and regular DVI dongles cost $29, the remote is $19, and driving an external screen larger than 1920x1200 requires the $99 dual-link DVI adapter. In February 2009, analog TV broadcasts will cease in the United States. As always, Apple is (painfully) ahead of the curve here: the mini DVI port on the previous MacBook models supported a video adapter with composite video and S-video outputs, but that option is not available for the new MacBooks or MacBook Pros. So if you want to connect your new laptop to your old TV, you'll have to get one with VGA, DVI, or HDMI inputs. HDMI should work by connecting a DVI-to-HDMI cable to the mini DisplayPort-to-DVI converter, but we haven't tested it, and your mileage may vary.

The new mini DisplayPort adapter supports the HDCP copy protection scheme that encrypts the digital signal between the computer and a screen. Unfortunately, Apple has deemed it necessary to make use of this new capability to make some iTunes Store video content unplayable on external screens that don't support HDCP, as we found out in October. Such a move was expected for Blu-ray playback when it finally arrives, but not for non-HD iTunes Store videos that play without trouble on the same external screens using an older Mac.